In order to establish, before we pass on, an important period of history, we should remark that the first blow in the war of wigs was really struck by a Queen, Christina of Sweden, who wore man’s clothes, and had appeared in 1680, in her hair of golden brown, powdered, and brushed up from her head.  She had, besides, says Misson, a slight beard.  The Pope, on his part, by a bull of March 1694, had somewhat let down the wig, by taking it from the heads of bishops and priests, and in ordering churchmen to let their hair grow.

Lord David, then, did not wear a wig, and did wear cowhide boots.  Such great things made him a mark for public admiration.  There was not a club of which he was not the leader, not a boxing match in which he was not desired as referee.  The referee is the arbitrator.

He had drawn up the rules of several clubs in high life.  He founded several resorts of fashionable society, of which one, the Lady Guinea, was still in existence in Pall Mall in 1772.  The Lady Guinea was a club in which all the youth of the peerage congregated.  They gamed there.  The lowest stake allowed was a rouleau of fifty guineas, and there was never less than 20,000 guineas on the table.  By the side of each player was a little stand on which to place his cup of tea, and a gilt bowl in which to put the rouleaux of guineas.  The players, like servants when cleaning knives, wore leather sleeves to save their lace, breastplates of leather to protect their ruffles, shades on their brows to shelter their eyes from the great glare of the lamps, and, to keep their curls in order, broad-brimmed hats covered with flowers.  They were masked to conceal their excitement, especially when playing the game of quinze.  All, moreover, had their coats turned the wrong way, for luck.  Lord David was a member of the Beefsteak Club, the Surly Club, and of the Splitfarthing Club, of the Cross Club, the Scratchpenny Club, of the Sealed Knot, a Royalist Club, and of the Martinus Scribblerus, founded by Swift, to take the place of the Rota, founded by Milton.

Though handsome, he belonged to the Ugly Club.  This club was dedicated to deformity.  The members agreed to fight, not about a beautiful woman, but about an ugly man.  The hall of the club was adorned by hideous portraits—­Thersites, Triboulet, Duns, Hudibras, Scarron; over the chimney was AEsop, between two men, each blind of an eye, Cocles and Camoens (Cocles being blind of the left, Camoens of the right eye), so arranged that the two profiles without eyes were turned to each other.  The day that the beautiful Mrs. Visart caught the small pox the Ugly Club toasted her.  This club was still in existence in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Mirabeau was elected an honorary member.

Since the restoration of Charles II. revolutionary clubs had been abolished.  The tavern in the little street by Moorfields, where the Calf’s Head Club was held, had been pulled down; it was so called because on the 30th of January, the day on which the blood of Charles I. flowed on the scaffold, the members had drunk red wine out of the skull of a calf to the health of Cromwell.  To the republican clubs had succeeded monarchical clubs.  In them people amused themselves with decency.